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It's been a while in the coming but now Novell is finally being sold off. The company is to be bought by Attachmate for US$2.2 billion. For many the move is unsurprising: Novell has been on the back foot for some time now and its flirtation with Linux served only to delay its final end. Once a company at the centre of the networking world, Novell has gradually lost influence and struggled to evolve into the company it needed to be.

Red Hat is an open-source company, while Novell is not, as Novell's CEO and CFO both emphasized in Novell's most recent earnings call. Sun, for its part, was desperately trying to reinvent itself as an open-source company, but struggled to do so given the weight of its declining hardware businesses.

It's almost time for another openSUSE release, and i'm sure there will be many articles written about it in the near future. openSUSE 11.1 plans to bring a whole bunch of new features to the desktop. But what about the company behind the SUSE logo? Novell get a lot of bad press, but do they really deserve it?

Novell has moved to quell growing concerns that it has sold Linux out to Microsoft as part of its Attachmate deal. On Wednesday, Novell chief marketing officer John Dragoon issued a short statement saying that Novell – not Microsoft – owns the copyrights on Unix.

I've openly wondered -- again and again -- whether Novell will ever connect the dots between SUSE Linux and the company's other product groups. A potential answer to that question has emerged. It involves Novell’s Intelligent Workload Management (IWM) strategy, which melds cloud and virtualization opportunities with Novell’s solutions. Here’s the scoop.

There's nothing like starting a technical conference, like Novell's BrainShare, off with a bang. Or, in this case telling Elliot Associates' unwelcome offer of not quite $2-billion for the company that Novell has no interest in selling out, not for that little anyway.

Well, this is fascinating. Here's an order from Judge Ted Stewart in a dispute between Novell and its insurer, Vigilant Insurance Company. Novell tried to get them to pay for the SCO v. Novell litigation back in 2004 and they refused, so Novell sued last May.

Attachmate has agreed to acquire Novell for $6.10 per share in cash. Attachmate, which got its start as a terminal emulation company in 1982, is privately held. Its primary owners are the private equity firms Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital and Thoma Bravo.